Undercover arrest stirs terror rift

But when the appointed hour arrived for Yussef and the investor to show up on Jan. 10, a switch was made. When the sheikh answered the knock at the door, the German federal police, and FBI agents, acting on a tip from the CIA, arrested the two men and whisked them away by helicopter to the Wellerstadt prison outside Frankfurt.

They are still being held there - pending extradition to the US - for providing material support to the Al Qaeda terrorist network. The US alleges that the sheikh is an associate of Abdul Raham al-Nashiri, who is a top Al Qaeda member charged with planning suicide bombings, including the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, in which 17 servicemen died. Al Nashiri was picked up - on a tip from Yemeni authorities - by the CIA at an airport in the United Arab Emirates in November.

A spokesman at the US Department of Justice says that, "because of law-enforcement sensitivities, the agency does not comment on extradition requests between countries." Nor would the CIA and FBI publicly comment on the case.

Germany, for its part, claims it is providing all the legal assistance it can to the US. But in order to turn these men over, German authorities say they must have evidence a crime was committed that is punishable in both Germany and the US - the country seeking extradition. But so far, they say, the evidence is inconclusive.

"We have nothing against them," says a German official. "When we act on a tip-off, our legal system starts to work. It's at the court in Frankfurt, where it will be resolved by mid-March."

On a recent visit to the US, Germany's intelligence chief admonished US Attorney General John Ashcroft to come up with better evidence - and soon, according to one official who attended the meeting. Germany, the official asserts, is becoming increasingly vexed with the case the US has so far presented. And the official says that Germany feels placed in a very precarious position - between the US and Yemen.

The German official says relations between Germany and Yemen in general have become so tenuous that Germany has temporarily canceled Lufthansa flights to Yemen and is warning its citizens not to travel there because of possible retaliatory strikes.

Yemeni officials, for their part, claim they were not told in advance about the plan to arrest the sheikh, and don't understand why.

"The arrests were a total surprise to us," says Abdulwahab al-Hajjri, Yemen's ambassador to the US. "We are asking the Germans to give them back to us, because we want to make sure they have something on them." Besides, he adds, "who better to interrogate them than their own countrymen who know the language, the culture?"

Ambassador Hajjri also says the sheikh is a prominent figure in Yemen, and the arrest is causing a backlash among a population already not happy with the country's cooperation with the US on the war on terror. "It sends a wrong signal to our population, which sometimes now believes we are cooperating with the US and other times we are not," he says. "And now they don't know if they can believe us about Sheikh Mouyad, who is very well loved and respected in Yemen."

Since the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen has cooperated more fully in the US fight on terror. That attack, Hajjri says, was also an attack on the economic interests of the Yemen government.

Since then, the Yemeni government has helped the CIA and FBI track down terrorists affiliated with Al Qaeda. In November, for example, they participated with the CIA in a missile attack that killed six alleged terrorists.

That's been followed by a number of smaller-scale, retaliatory attacks on Yemeni government officials. And in early December, a French oil tanker was bombed off the coast, in the same way the Cole was attacked. Later in December, three US missionaries and a Yemeni official were killed by radical Islamists.

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